Kali is 9!

Kali doesn't get her fair share of exposure on the blog these days.  She is also cute and fun and creative and huggable and all those things.  But she is not nearly as busy.  And it would be a very boring video to put a clip up of what she is doing for many hours each day!  We have ourselves a tried and true bookworm! She devours chapter books at an impressive rate.  She is very into the Mandie series (after Joyce, who lives with us, gave her over a dozen).  She came home from the library the other day all excited to report to me that there were more in the series than she knew (40!). 

It appears that she is enjoying community living as much as the rest of us.  She also enjoys her post as "mail lady," though she has given herself Wednesdays off. 

She had a very fun week transitioning from 8 to 9 years of age.  Her actual birthday was celebrated at the Rockingham County Fair.  We were all pretty bleary eyed when we arrived home close to 1 a.m. after a full evening of rides, a birthday picnic, looking at animals, going to a hypnotist show, riding more rides in the dark and then ending the evening with ice cream and a few presents (the evening doubly fun since Emily and Jonas joined us for the festivities).

We recovered from the fair just in time for our first ever New Fool's Day party.  The mystery dinner was almost over when I realized I was having so much fun and so busy serving that I did not take any pictures of the meal (I never really did get good pictures)  The menu included:

take a stab at it
weed strips
T
bumpy ride for an ant
big bird would feel right at home
a relative of a snooze
energy saver's delight
eco-friendly and good for your heart
a cuddle
if chickens grew on trees
food needing an antidepressant
don't scare the birthday girl
midnight ball drop

You are welcome to try to match them up to lambsquarter pasta, fancy cut carrot circles, black olives, no bake chocolate peanut butter cookies, string beans, fried eggplant, frozen blueberries, sesame seed bread, a spoon, fork, knife, napkin and tea.

The rest of the evening was spent having fun with water balloons, playing attraction repulsion, eating funny cake pie, sitting around the fire roasting marshmallows and trying to think of jokes, dancing out on the lawn, being unsuccessful at finding a single lightning bug to release at midnight, toasting toast (and sparkling juice) to ring in the next year and finally crashing after 1 a.m. (of course Kali was not tired!)

I, on the other hand, am happy to admit that I'm tired.  And for that reason here are two other random fair pictures that I'm putting at the bottom of this post because the formatting is going bonkers with me trying to insert them where it makes sense to put them!  The month of August is nearing the end, and I'm about as tired as I expected I would be.  But it has also been a really good and fun month in so many ways.  There have also been some very visible changes outdoor as Jonathan (part of the Tangly Woods crew) and Jason get more into some of the permaculture mapping of our place (and designing some areas, which includes clearing, which means big visual changes).  I'm noting here, as I know is a goal of both Jason and mine, that we are going to work at slowing up this winter - at least for a little bit!